Shadow-Box

Antonia Logue's Shadow-Box blends historical fact with imaginative fiction in a sometimes awkward but ultimately compelling mix. Working in her favor is a cast of characters unlike any other. Mina Loy, the painter and Dadaist poet notorious for her beauty, her love affairs, and her flamboyant home-made hats; her husband, Arthur Cravan, a semi-professional boxer, art critic, and loup garou of polite society; and Cravan's friend Jack Johnson, Heavyweight Champion of the World on the eve of World War I, when being a black boxer meant facing death threats and abuse. Theirs is an extraordinary story, featuring cameos from art-world luminaries like Marinetti and Duchamp, and chronicling a passion as grand on the page as it was in real life.

The novel begins in 1946, 30 years after Cravan disappeared off the coast of Guatemala, as Mina and Jack begin a late-life correspondence. Reflective and far-ranging, their letters both recount their life stories and attempt to come to terms with the enigmatic figure of Cravan. Jack and Mina's voices too often sound alike, and the epistolary premise occasionally wears thin ("I was worried you might not write back--I'm glad you wrote back so fast. You're right in what you said. All the stuff we know about each other and we don't really know a damned thing..."). But there are other passages that ring both poetic and true to the historical characters they portray, as when Marinetti declares himself to Mina:

'Mrs Haweis, alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls, alone, it is you that I have come for Mrs Haweis, you alone.'

A few pages into each chapter, the narrative's sheer momentum takes over, and the reader is immersed in a world of boxing rings and surrealist salons, bullfights, and high modernist art. Believable, beautifully researched, this is a first novel of astonishing confidence and range. Look for great things in Logue's future. --Mary Park